Update: Odd start to the year

Alright, so a couple things about the start of 2024. It's going to be a little odd. As you may have noticed, I didn't post anything last Friday. I also likely won't post anything this coming Friday, either. The first reason for that is that, as I discussed in my Retrospective 2023, I need a break so I'm taking January a little easier.

Which isn't to say I'm not writing, I do have a couple of articles cooking, many of which are for non-Steam games. I'm trying to focus on the games on consoles for now, I'm a starting work on the Year Plans on Nintendo consoles, and looking into the other games here and there that I'm interested in.

However, a lot of my year plans involve games I'd love to play but can't. I got myself a brand new computer late last year, and I'm already having issues that need repairs. Some games I played or tried to play - namely Valheim, For Honor, and Assassin's Creed III - would crash my computer a few minutes to half an hour in, provoking a BSOD. Needless to say, that's got me worried. So I'm going to take my computer in for repairs tomorrow morning and I won't have it until... well, I hope to have it back next Monday. Hopefully at little to no cost, seeing as it's still on guarantee.

While I wait for all that to be resolved, I'm at least planning ahead. I'll spend my few computer-less days watching the films I hope to cover... in February, I guess?

So, reviews proper will be the movies, then the non-Steam stuff. However, I am very tempted to have an unrelated long article to ease myself back into writing. Tempted to write about music. Yeah, you can expect an article about music soon-ish.

Retrospective 2023

Yet another year that’s been alright for me, yet one that’s been catastrophic on a larger scale. The Ukraine-Russia war is still ongoing, and we have the Israel-Hamas war on top of that. Canada is on its way to a recession, the prices of everything skyrocketed this year, and I can feel the financial dread increasing. Speaking of dread, there’s a lot of it regarding next year's elections in the United States. I don’t think Americans quite realize just how influential, for better and especially for worse, their politics are to the rest of the world, and there’s potential for another disaster. On the plus side, just as I predicted last year, some people are finally getting their just desserts. Let’s hope the trend continues in 2024.

Meanwhile, X, Formerly Twitter (nobody will ever call it just X), is somehow still around, despite every attempt from Elon Musk, accidental or not, to destroy it from within. The guy even had an AI designed for the website, called Grok, and it instantly turned on Musk and his ass-backwards, teenage edgelord worldviews. Some will say I shouldn’t feast while billionaires have their crap blow up in their faces; I don’t care. Pass the popcorn.

But of course, things are always a little brighter on a personal level. Let’s see... On the negative, I think I never went to more funerals than this year, I caught Covid in August for what I assume to be the first time (In fact, I don't recall being sick as often in a single year as I was in 2023), and I’ve had a streak of intense bad luck in the very last days that were topped off by another cold. However, I can recount many positives: I finished paying my car; I got myself a Switch and a brand new computer; I again went to a convention in the U.S.; I joined Bluesky; I discovered new music bands I’m now addicted to; and I participated to two podcasts in French, which have been posted to YouTube, the two videos are this one and this one if you’re interested.

Oh, and some time ago I donated to a Kickstarter by Stray Fawn Studios, who made Niche – a genetics survival game. In my original review of that game, I said I wanted a plushie of the starting character. Well, guess what:

I originally said that as a joke! I’ll have to joke about that more often!

I remember not being too happy with how serious and downbeat many of my articles were back in 2022. This was corrected in 2023, but the tradeoff is that I feel like I didn’t review a lot of games overall. Only 34 in total. On the plus side, I love my idea of the Year Plans, even if I didn’t cover as many of them as I would have liked; I’ll do these again this year. I had a smart idea with the Gaming Memories, filling in time on weeks without a proper article. I celebrated the tenth anniversary of the blog, and I’m almost at a million views on the blog. So far so good, I guess. I also had my first article hidden by a content warning by Blogger; because I wasn’t clear enough that my article titled “Just Die Already” was about an indie game, hence why I specified the studio in the retitle. I don’t know what to expect regarding my output in 2024. In the meantime, how about I do my retrospective now?

My favorite reviews/articles of 2023

10. Rampage. Gotta acknowledge my January movie reviews in some capacity. I’ll probably do a few like this at the start of the year again.

9. Beyond Good and Evil. It was great to experience such a famous and beloved title for the first time, and I think I conveyed its story and my impressions well.

8. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. This has been a year where I covered a handful of highly appreciated titles, so I’m glad I reported on this one (even if I still think it hasn’t aged super well gameplay-wise).

7. Top 12 Boss Battle Types. It was fun to figure out which types were my favorites and how they ranked, and it feels like I conveyed it well.

6. Freedom Planet. That one had been on my radar for a while, it was great to discover it at last!

5. WarioWare: Get It Together. It was a little clunky to have a paragraph detailing how every character plays, but it was much more complete than just leaving a sentence or two within a paragraph for it.

4. Streamline. Even though I couldn’t really play this one, I still played fair and gave it as best a eulogy as I could, considering the odd situation with this one.

3. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. Rarely has a review, short or long, ever been this easy to write. The only reason it doesn’t rank higher is that it’s a Quick one.

2. Sonic Forces. Didn’t get nearly enough views for the effort I put into it. I tried to cover every single aspect and analyze the story in as much depth as I could, so that makes the article stand out.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. Playing through it did enlighten me to why this game is so beloved and influential.

Year Plans 2023: What I've Missed

I felt like closing the year with this. All the way back in my Retrospective for 2022, I set up this new concept of the Year Plans, in which I picked a number of games from my collection that I hoped to play through and review on the blog during the following 12 months. Part of the idea was that, since I have such a large backlog, I would focus on a few titles on top of the yearly Quick Reviews.

I even thought of adding a new main page to the blog to keep track of the ones I had selected for this year.

I did go through all the titles selected for the Quick Reviews, because I like the concept and it’s an easy way to knock a couple out through a few months. The longer titles, that’s a different story; I didn't get to cover as many as I would've liked. So, instead of giving them a full playthrough and article, I figured I would either discuss what my plans were/might be for each title, or give a quick “First Impressions” after playing each one for about an hour, depending on the case.

Today, it’s a relaxed article. Nothing too complex, just me chatting about games I know and trying out a few I haven’t played yet.

Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation

Yet another game that’s unavailable for purchase on the Steam Store (since May 2022), I’ve had this one sitting in my library since 2021. A purchase on Humble Bundle four years prior included four DLC packs for the game... but not the game itself. It’s been odd every time I reviewed on here a game that could no longer been purchased, but I feel it’s important and interesting to do so, like keeping track of what's been lost. This entry by BKOM studios, whose headquarters are in Quebec City, is meant to be a virtual version of an existing board game, Tomb of Annihilation. It does have that tabletop feel, and the association with Dungeons & Dragons (a license expiration may be the reason why the game got delisted) is clear as day... I say that as if I have ever played that game...

On the other hand, the codes for the DLCs still worked, so... I have that to look forward to when I'll dig deeper into this one. This was a fun hour!

Gaming Memories: Mighty Final Fight

A last Gaming Memories article for the year? Let's go.

Mighty Final Fight

Nintendo Entertainment System

July 1993 (NA)

One of the NES games I recall playing the most. Outside of this entry, I have no real connection to the Final Fight series, comprised of side-scrolling beat'em-ups and whose first entry was released to arcades in 1989. This is a retelling of that game's story, delivered with a comedic tone and a super-deformed style.

The story, a classic of the era: A girl kidnapped by bad guys. In this case, it is Mayor Mike Haggar's daughter, Jessica, taken by the Mad Gear Gang. Haggar enlists the help of his two friends Cody and Guy, and all three set out to open a whole can of whoop-ass onto various bikers, thieves, and other street scum on their way to Belger, the gang's leader.

The game is set across five stages and had everything to please me: Players and enemies alike have health bars visible at the top of the screen, and enemies come in all shapes and sizes (and gimmicks). All three characters have a wide array of moves, and can even learn more as the game includes a simple (if not simplistic) experience system. Haggar feels like the Easy Mode, being tougher and having stronger moves than his allies and starting out at LV3, compared to Guy and Cody's LV1s. That said, the two guys are speedier. Alas, no 2-Player Mode, but I can't say multiplayer on home console was ever a thing I cared for.

A few sequences within levels feel like mini-games. One notable example being in Stage 1, where the selected fighter has to break incoming barrels (and may also find items that increase their EXP). The bosses are all notable; utterly silly but also pretty dangerous. Unfortunately, the game is also very short, at five stages, and can be finished in well under an hour. Bit disappointing, not gonna lie.

It's short and easy enough that I finished the game multiple times. It ranked among my favorites on the NES alongside Startropics, DuckTales, the Mario games, and more that I'll eventually get to. I can't say I consider myself a beat'em-up connoisseur, but I do think this one's worth checking out. Maybe it's the nostalgia talking, that's usually the case in these Gaming Memories articles. (At least for now, as I focus on the games I really did care for - the ones I didn't, that's gonna be a different story.)

Top 12 Boss Battle Types

Let’s end the year on a more relaxed article.

Boss battles are one of the defining traits of video games. Most genres include them in one way or another, and it’s tricky, but not impossible, to imagine a game that does not have them. They represent thresholds to cross in the story a game tells; they run the gamut from easy to insane in terms of difficulty; early ones may teach you a skill, later ones may force you to master that same skill; and they can be central to the plot, if any, or wholly unrelated.

Because I covered a lot of them, expect several
examples pulled from Nintendo games.

In over 50 years of video games, there’s been plenty of room for experimentation in how video games work and how their stories are told. As a result, we’re not lacking in types of bosses out there waiting to spring out and offer a challenge. Full disclosure, the types of bosses covered today are mostly described through their entries on TVTropes, because it’s a simple way to accurately discuss them. It’s also going to help fishing up examples for each type making the list, as I hope to pick from titles I discussed on this very blog to illustrate my choices. I’ve been reviewing stuff for 10 years now, so I ought to have examples for each of them. "Boss Battle Types" can cover the boss itself or the kind of battle we have against it.

This is, obviously, a subjective list going off how I feel these types of bosses and battles rank against each other, or above the ones I excluded. Are there any that you feel I missed out on? Feel free to comment!

Word to the wise, don’t make a drinking game out of every time I use the word “boss” here. I don’t want a death on my friggin’ conscience.

We’re starting with...

12. The “Tactical Suicide Boss”

While cutting the various types of bosses down to twelve only for the list (as my original cut picked out of 64 possible options on TVTropes’ page about boss battles), I eventually wondered whether I wanted to focus more on the bosses themselves, or the type of strategy needed to defeat them. I wound up focusing on the monsters, but there’s a handful of entries for strategies, and we open on one.

King K. Rool would be unstoppable, but he has to throw his
crown to attack, exposing his soft noggin.

The core idea behind the “tactical suicide boss” trope involves a boss that would, by all accounts, be undefeatable. There’s just one problem: To attack, this enemy must reveal the only means of harming them. This differs from battles where the means of defeat of the boss is found in the arena itself, another type of oversight on the part of a baddie we’re battling. There’s something poetic to how the fault lies entirely on the enemy themselves for exposing the one thing that can beat them, and it feels even more satisfying as a result. Due to these parameters, this specific type is more common to platform and adventure games, but has been seen in other genres as well.